Wildlife Watching Wednesday: The Large Milkweed Bug
By: Tom Berg
If you have milkweed plants in your garden for the benefit of monarch butterflies, good job! Monarchs need milkweed as a host plant where they can lay their eggs. Monarch caterpillars feed exclusively on milkweed plants, including their close milkweed relatives. But monarchs are not the only insects to utilize milkweed. One other example is the Large Milkweed Bug!
It sounds like a pretty boring name, but the large milkweed bug got its name from feeding on milkweed plants. They are distributed throughout North America, and adult versions of this bug have a distinctive orange and black pattern on their wings. The juvenile nymphs (seen in the photo here) are almost completely red or reddish orange, with dark brown legs and with heads and antennae that are brown or black, too.
Juvenile large milkweed bugs do not feed on the leaves of the milkweed plant like the caterpillars of monarch butterflies. Instead, young milkweed bugs gather on the seed pods and they eat the milkweed seeds. The red and orange colors of these insects act as a warning to predators that they taste bad. The reason is simple - the milkweed bugs ingest toxins from the milkweed plant and although the toxins do not affect them, they make the milkweed bugs taste terrible to anything that tries to eat them!
Even though the young milkweed bugs must eat milkweed seeds to develop properly, adult large milkweed bugs can feed on a few other plants in addition to common milkweed. Butterfly bush, oleander and white twinevine (in the dogbane family) are a few of the other plants they will visit.
Although some people are alarmed when they see a large mass of red insects on the milkweed plants in their garden, there is no need to panic. Milkweed bugs do very little damage to the plants and they are usually only present late in the summer season once the milkweed plants have developed seed pods. Monarch butterflies are not molested by them, so do not use pesticides on the milkweed plants. Pesticides will likely kill monarch butterflies and their caterpillars.
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